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Isn't optical scanning as hackable as if the votes were originally recorded electronically, though? Or are people performing random checks on the machine's count? (Honestly curious)

Don't get me wrong, running open source software is a plus for many reasons, if one is using software at all. But any automation in elections seems to carry a hard to bound amount of risk.

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Random manual recounts are done on a statistically significant portion of paper ballots. Additionally, paper ballots allow for manual recounts in contested contests (e.g. a legal challenge).

E.g. see https://twitter.com/SFElections/status/534405668258594816 and https://twitter.com/SFElections/status/535541022915186688

And here is a video of the random selection process for last week's election (the two tweets above are from last year):

http://sfgov2.org/index.aspx?page=4938

This took place this morning (Tuesday, November 10). I'm the lone member of the public who showed up and rolled the dice the first few times (5:15 into the upper video). :)

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